Saturday, April 21, 2012

Four complete stories, all average fare. But I'll note two especially:

"Mother's Tattoos" is the first one I've seen where body implants drive a programmable tattoo-based user interface, turning the whole human skin into a touch-screen display.

"Ernesto" makes a curious claim: cancer could be cured if patient's body could be tricked (e.g., by artificially infecting with a serious disease causing bacteria) to produce antibodies in a large enough quantities.

Table of contents (best first, unread last)

[novelette] Richard A Lovett's "Mother's Tattoos" (B): Life of a US undercover agent, looking for potential terrorists in his own country.

[novelette] Craig DeLancey's "The Ediacarian Machine" (B): A robotic alien ambassador has been waiting on earth for some 550 million years - waiting for local life to evolve to an intelligence level where it can present its credentials! Now, it's ready to present them to humanity...

[novelette] Alec Nevala-Lee's "Ernesto" (B): A certain saint's tomb has been doing a healing miracle - patients with terminal stage cancer prostrate there for several days, & come back fully cured! A journalist investigates the matters, & comes back with a physical explanation.

[novelette] Kyle Kirkland's "Upon Their Backs" (B): Yet another alien invasion story where alien consciousness travels space as radiation & partly overwrites the invaded human's mind. Only the problem is a little more complex, as the invader parasite itself has been infected with yet another radiation parasite. Told as an ambiguous hypothesis story.